In this book, the author writes freely and often humorously about his
life, beginning with his earliest childhood days. He describes his
survival of American bombing raids when he was a teenager in Japan, his
emergence as a researcher in a post-war university system that was
seriously deficient, and his life as a mature mathematician in Princeton
and in the international academic community. Every page of this memoir
contains personal observations and striking stories. Such luminaries as
Chevalley, Oppenheimer, Siegel, and Weil figure prominently in its
anecdotes.
Goro Shimura is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton
University. In 1996, he received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime
Achievement from the American Mathematical Society. He is the author of
Elementary Dirichlet Series and Modular Forms (Springer 2007),
Arithmeticity in the Theory of Automorphic Forms (AMS 2000), and
Introduction to the Arithmetic Theory of Automorphic Functions
(Princeton University Press 1971).